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You may have noticed a few Apple Watch-friendly iOS apps trickle out, but brace yourself: you're about to face a torrent of them. Apple has opened up WatchKit app submissions to all developers (not just the handful of early partners from before), so anyone who has been toiling over wristwear-ready software in the past few months can finally put it on your iPhone. Given that the Apple Watch release is still three weeks away, this suggests that the App Store will be well-stocked on day one.

LG's new mobile VR headset -- which is basically just a plastic version of Google's cardboard VR viewer -- is finally hitting American shores. The company just announced that it'll be throwing in a free headset, simply called the VR for G3, with the purchase of its latest flagship Android phone at participating retailers. Since it's adopting the Google Cardboard platform, which is just a box that you can plug your smartphone in for simple VR experiences, there really isn't much to LG's offering. You just need to slide in a G3 unit and load up a VR app (LG will also link users to some VR gaming content). It also features a magnet that works together with the phone's gyroscope (again, just like Google's box), that lets you select things without interacting with the screen. Unfortunately, it's still unclear how existing G3 owners can get their hands on LG's VR headset (we've dropped a line for additional details).

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Flickr has long had ways to let others use and tweak your photos, but if you want to give up your copyright altogether? You can now do just that. In the wake of Elon Musk releasing SpaceX's photos to public domain, Flickr has added options for public domain and Creative Commons 0 ("no rights reserved") licenses. Choose them and others can do whatever they want with your images, free of charge or even credit. If you see your photography as more of a service for the greater good than a closely guarded treasure, you can loosen the restrictions today.

GoPro doesn't make square, cube-like cameras, but if it did, the picture (after the break) is probably what they'd look like. The image comes from a patent granted to GoPro today. The protection covers a "Camera housing for a square-profile camera," rather than a camera itself (makers of square cameras, your time to check is now). Sifting through the claims, the patent mentions how the square housing would allow a camera to be mounted in numerous orientations (thanks, geometry!) regardless of how you mount it. There are identical openings on three of the sides also, to provide access to ports (like you can with the current "Frame" mount) in any orientation.

Sid Meier scares the crap out of me. I'm deeply familiar with the famed strategy game creator's resume -- from the history-spanning Civilization series to the high seas simulations in Sid Meier's Pirates! -- but I've only ever played one of his games. The reason I never picked another up after trying Civilization III is that once I started playing I didn't stop for about 36 hours. The man makes a deeply cerebral game but also a deeply addictive one. Let it never be said that I won't try things twice, though! Today on JXE Streams, I'll give into the allure of deep space exploration and play Sid Meier's Starships.

Nope, it's not the new MacBook. That review will need to wait until next month. What we have here is the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display. For all intents and purposes, it's the same one we last tested in late 2013, except for one important thing: It swaps out the old trackpad in favor of a pressure-sensitive "Force Touch" pad that responds differently depending on how hard you bear down on it. (A hard-press on the skip button in QuickTime, for instance, will let you fast-forward at warp speed.) In addition, the new MBP brings all the spec upgrades you'd expect in a system refresh, including faster SSDs, fresh graphics and Intel's latest Core processors. At $1,299-plus, it's priced the same as before, and since the design and Retina display haven't changed, you're likely to enjoy it as much as you did the last-gen model. I can't promise you'll love the new touchpad, though.

Charter lost out on its chance to snatch Time Warner Cable before Comcast made its move, so it's settling for the next best thing. The company just unveiled plans to acquire Bright House Networks, a cable provider that's mostly big in Florida, for about $10.4 billion. Reportedly, the move is about getting "strategic flexibility" and solidifying Charter's position as the second-largest cable company in the US. In other words, it wants to both improve its clout in relation to Comcast (even if the two don't have competing networks) and streamline its costs. That last part is important in an era where services like Netflix are diminishing the importance of conventional TV. If Charter can't have TWC, it can at least prepare for a future where it can't depend on expensive programming bundles to turn a profit.

Techie culture-vultures aren't likely to encounter Vine upload fails anymore at Seattle's home to arts, culture and the Space Needle thanks to Microsoft. The city's biggest patron has installed a new WiFi service at the Seattle Center that uses new technology to blow away the previous system's speed and capacity. The installation is a pilot program for Microsoft Research's white space tech that harnesses long-range, wall-penetrating TV signals. Along with quadruple the access points, the tech gives the Seattle Center public WiFi speeds up to 5,000 times faster, letting you Skype, Vine and Meerkat to your heart's content.

Ladies and gentlemen, get ready for some new Chromebooks. Yep, Google has just announced four new Chrome OS laptops, all of which lean toward the budget-friendly end of the spectrum. They are the ASUS Chromebook Flip, the ASUS Chromebook C201, the Hisense Chromebook and the Haier Chromebook 11 (This also comes in an educational version dubbed the 11e). Though it's the priciest model at $249, the most notable one by far is ASUS' Chromebook Flip. Not only is it the slimmest of the bunch with a thickness of only 15mm, it has a 10.1-inch touchscreen IPS display that can be flipped (hence the name) 360 degrees around.

Google has unveiled a whole new type of Chrome device, and it's one that can fit in your pocket. It's called the Chromebit, and it's essentially a Chromebook crammed in a dongle. This tiny little package contains a Rockchip 3288 SoC, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of eMMC memory, a USB 2.0 port, WiFi 802.11 ac support, Bluetooth 4.0, a Smart Ready controller and an ARM Mali 760 quad-core GPU. Just like Intel's Compute Stick, all you have to do to get the Chromebit working is to attach it to any display with a HDMI port, and voila, you've turned it into a computer. Unlike the Intel stick though, the Chromebit's HDMI end actually swivels around so that the dongle doesn't stick out in an unsightly way behind a monitor or TV. As for battery life, well, Google says it doesn't really know that just yet as the product is still in testing. Google promises that the Chromebit -- the first is made by ASUS -- will retail for less than $100. It'll be available in either silver, blue or orange and will be out later this summer.

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